This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler

ROSE AND ROSE

BY
E. V. LUCAS

SECOND EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

ROSE AND ROSE

Fifty years ago, when I was a young medical student, I was in the habit of spending as many week-ends as possible at home with my father, to whose practice I was one day to succeed.

On a certain Saturday the only other occupants of the railway compartment were an artist and his wife. I knew him to be an artist from certain scraps of his conversation that I overheard, but I should have guessed it also on the evidence of his hands and dress. I don’t mean that he wore a black velvet tam-o’-shanter and trousers tight at the ankles, as in plays; but his hands were eloquent, and there was a general careless ease about his tweeds that suggested the antipodes of any commercial or anxious calling.

After a while he turned to me and asked if I knew the town of Lowcester.

I said that I had lived in the neighbourhood—at Bullingham, five miles away—all my life.

“We are going to spend a few days at the Crown at Lowcester,” he said, “looking about to try and find a house.”

“There’s a very good house at Bullingham,” I said: “just empty. Jolly garden too. As a matter of fact it adjoins ours. My father’s the doctor.”

“Next door to the doctor,” said the lady, speaking now for the first time. “That would be a great convenience.”

One result of this chance meeting was that they took the house and we became friends; another was the general shaping of my life; and a third is this narrative, the fruit of an old man’s egoism and leisure.

I don’t put my own case as an example to the medical profession, but you can’t deny there is a kind of fitness in it: it is surely more proper than not that the doctor who presides at the birth of a child should continue to take an interest in that child throughout its life. Being born is, after all, something of an event, and he who assists in that adventure and helps to introduce a new soul (not to mention a new body) to this already overcrowded and over-complicated planet of ours, ought to be counted as something a little more important than a jobbing gardener, say, or any other useful ally that the householder calls in. For no matter how mechanical his services, he is also an instrument of destiny.

None the less, if accoucheurs were expected to follow the fortunes of every new arrival from the cradle to the grave one of two things would happen: either the medical profession would disappear for want of recruits, or home life (with the addition of the semi-parental doctor intervening between father and mother) would become more difficult than it already is. Perhaps then it is as well that the man-with-the-black-bag remains the piano-tuner that he more or less appears to be. But I shall continue to believe that so tremendous an affair as a birth should carry more fatefulness with it; although for the well-being of patients I can see that it is better that doctors should be machines rather than sympathetic temperaments. Good Heavens! if we were not so mechanical into what sentimental morasses should we land ourselves!

All this, however, is more or less irrelevant and too much concerned with myself. But you will find that preoccupation, I fear, throughout this story, such as it is. I commenced author, you see, at a time of life when it is not easy to keep to the point or exclude garrulity. When one does not take to writing until one is over seventy—I shall be seventy-one this year, 1920—readers must expect a certain want of business-like adroitness. Had you known me in the days when I was in practice, before I was established on the shelf, you would have found me, I hope, direct and forcible and relevant enough. The stethoscope was mightier than the pen.

Still, there is more relevance than perhaps you would think, for I am coming to a case where the doctor and the newly-born established an intimacy that was destined to grow and to endure through life. For, as it chanced, my father died very soon after I was qualified, and when our new neighbours, the Allinsons, became parents, it was I who was called in to assist. I was then twenty-seven. Circumstances of personal friendship and contiguity alone might have promoted a closer association than is customary between the babe and the intermediary; but the controlling factors were the death of the mother, after which many of the decisions which a mother would have to make devolved on me; and Rose’s delicate little body, which caused her during her early years to need fairly constant watching. The result was that until a certain unexpected event happened she moved about almost exclusively between her father’s house and mine, and was equally at home in both. But even with such a beginning it never crossed my mind that the strands of our fate were to be so interwoven.

Rose’s father was a landscape painter of rather more than independent means: sufficient at any rate to make it possible for him to seek loveliness in no matter how distant a land. He had sketches which he had made all over Europe, in Morocco, in Egypt, in Japan. But France was his favourite hunting ground, partly, I think, because he liked the comments of the French peasants who stood behind his easel better than those of any other critic.

Artists, even when they are poor, are enviable men. They live by enjoyment—their work is fun—for even if the unequal struggle to persuade pigments to reproduce nature fills them with despair, they are still occupied with beauty, still seeing only what they want to see, and remote from squalor and sordidness and the ills of life.

Theodore Allinson took the fullest advantage of his artistic temperament and his private fortune. The one enabled him to ignore whatever was unpleasing, and the other to fulfil every wandering caprice. It was all in keeping with such a man’s destiny that he should have as a next-door neighbour an ordinary trustworthy fellow like myself, who could be depended upon to keep an eye on his motherless infant when he was absent. Or, for that matter, when he was present too. He would have taken it as a very cruel injustice on the part of the gods if I had moved to any other part of the kingdom—as probably any decently ambitious young man in my position would have done. How he would have raised his clenched fists to Heaven and railed against fate! But, luckily for him, I could eat the lotus too.

My lotus-eating, however, would have been only half as delightful if Allinson were not my neighbour and his small daughter my protegée. For he was easy and amusing and full of whimsical fancies, with a very solid foundation of culture beneath all, and his little girl was a continual joy.

She had taken to me at once, or at any rate had taken to my watch—watches having always been useful links between infantile patients and their medical men. Mine was a gold repeater, very satisfying to immature gums and surprising and amusing to the ear. I still have it, and sophisticated though the world has grown, and mechanically melodious with gramophone and piano-player, it still chimes for the young with all its old allurement.

As Rose developed, the function of the repeater as a mediator decreased in importance, and she and I took to more ordinary means of communicating our sympathy; but the watch laid the foundations and laid them truly.

It is extraordinary what a small child’s tongue can do with an honest English name. Every one has had experience of this fantastic adaptive gift, but none could be more curious than my own. My name is Greville—Julius Greville, M.D., if you please—and if there is a sound less like Greville than “Dombeen” I should like to be told of it; but Dombeen was Rose’s translation of what she so often heard her father call me, and Dombeen I have remained to her. Of all the music in the world none was more sweet to me than her cool clear voice calling “Dombeen! Dombeen!”

Our gardens were separated only by an old fruit wall with a gate in it, both sides of the gate being equally Rose’s domain; and I used to rejoice when on returning from my rounds I saw her dainty proud little head among the fruit bushes.

Briggs, my gardener and my father’s gardener before me, was the happier for her society too, as she circled about him like a robin and never ceased her inquisitorial functions.

“Lord, but she do flummox me sometimes,” he would say. “The things that child wants to know! It isn’t only book-learning that’s needed, it’s flower-learning too. It makes me feel that ignorant.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well, why one flower’s blue and another pink. Man and boy I’ve worked in gardens, and with good head-men over me too when I was learning—Scotchmen and all—but I never heard about that. Never even wondered about it. ‘So as to look prettier in nosegays’ was all I could say; but it must go deeper than that. I told her to ask you, you being a gentleman of learning, but she says, ‘No, no, Briggs, it’s what a gardener ought to know,’ and she’s right.

“Here’s some more nuts of hers to crack—‘Why do some flowers have scent and others don’t?’ ‘Who discovered that potatoes are good to eat?’ ‘Who began to put horse-radish with beef?’ ‘Why are butterflies called butterflies?’ Really, sir, you ought to take her on, she makes me seem that ignorant. She won’t ask me the things I do know. The funny part of it is,” Briggs went on, “she doesn’t want to have a garden of her own. Some children are mad about that, but she doesn’t care. All she wants is to walk about among the flowers, or stand by me, and watch and watch.”

And off he went.

He came back a moment later. “It would be very good of you,” he said, “to try and find out why butterflies are called butterflies. My missis wants to know too.”

I remember another of Briggs’ stories of Rose. “The other day,” he said—this was when Rose was about six—“she brought a tooth—the one that you gave her a shilling for if she didn’t cry when she went to have it pulled—and what do you think? She wanted me to plant it for her. Plant it! And what for? So as it would grow into a soldier, as it did in some book they’d been reading to her.

“‘A soldier!’ I said, wishing to tease her a little, ‘why a soldier, I should like to know? Why not a gardener?’

“‘Pooh, gardeners!’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t be any fun. Besides, teeth don’t grow into gardeners anyway, they grow into soldiers’; and she comes out every morning and evening to water it.”

Rose’s want of interest in work of any kind extended to games. Her boredom when her father and I were at croquet or billiards was abysmal, and I could never induce her to persevere with a mallet. Her playground was the world, and her play was to be in it, and see it, and, I doubt not, speculate as to its peculiarities. She liked to have stories read to her, but she liked better to invent them for herself and relate them to herself as she walked about, outdoors or in. But when she could get one’s whole attention, which is the too-often-frustrated desire of most children, she was happiest. A walk with me in the garden when I was “ab-so-loot-ly” idle, without scissors or spud or preoccupation, was one of her special treats; the tendency of grown up people to let their eyes wander towards weeds or suckers or green fly being among her heavy crosses.

But her crosses were few. She must have been one of the first children for whom those in authority made the world primarily a happy place. It is more or less the rule now, but it was exceptional then.

Like most little girls, she was interested in young creatures: more than interested, enchanted by them. The finest horse in the world—Iroquois, say, who had just won the Derby—the finest cow, the finest sheep, left her calm; but she trembled with rapture on catching sight of a foal or a calf or a lamb. If the lamb had a black face she screamed with joy. As for puppies and kittens, she lost her head completely over them. Again and again I have had to stop, when she has been on my rounds with me, while she got down in order to embrace one of these impostors, and the uglier the kitten was the more she loved it. I could never break her of the habit—an extremely insanitary one, I am convinced—of hugging stray kittens.

It was odd that an ugly one should appeal to her more than a perfect one; but odder that any injured creature had such an immediate claim on her sympathy. Many children are afraid of animals that are maimed and in pain: or at any rate they avoid them. But Rose collected them. Birds with broken wings, mangy puppies, kittens that had been scalded or lamed—her infirmary always contained one or more specimens of these, and we all had to help in nursing them back to vigour.

Such was Rose in those early days when we were still neighbours. And then came one of the crises in the life of both of us.

I had been on a long day’s round and returned tired out, after eight in the evening, with the doctor’s dread in my mind that another call would be waiting. There was indeed a telegram, but it was not of the kind that I had feared, but a worse. It was from the British Consul at Marseilles stating that Theodore Allinson had died of typhoid fever two days before, and that his effects were being forwarded home.

Allinson’s household consisted at that time of Rose’s nurse and several servants under a cook, and I went over after dinner to break the news. It was, however, broken. We had so few telegrams in those days that their contents always became public, and I found the staff in tears. Rose, however, I was glad to find, had not been told.

The next thing was to inform the relatives, chief of whom was Mrs. Stratton, Theodore’s sister, older by a few years, whose husband was something in the city; and a telegram, despatched to her the next morning, brought herself and Mr. Stratton quickly on the scene.

Mrs. Stratton was as different from her brother as two members of the same family can be—and often are. Where he was gay and insouciant, she was grave and anxious. He was full of fun and banter; but to her life was real, life was earnest. Where he let things slide she was all for management and control. She was a big woman too, with a suggestion always of having her square-sails set and bearing down on you before the wind.

As for George Stratton, he was the nice quiet somewhat invertebrate husband that such women capture.

No sooner was Mrs. Stratton in the house than she got to work and explored every room systematically, sniffing a good deal as she inspected the canvases in the studio. Drawings were turned out, documents read, and Rose was sent off to Lowcester to be properly fitted out with black. I offered to take the child into my house until the memorial service was over, but Mrs. Stratton declined; and on this rebuff I disappeared from the scene and was not again in evidence until the ceremony in the church, which most of the neighbours and various relations, near and distant, attended.

I was however called out to a case a few miles away, and was therefore not present at the luncheon that followed; but I returned in time to take my place, at the lawyer’s invitation, in the studio to hear the reading of the will, in which, the lawyer informed me, to my great surprise, I was mentioned.

“As,” he announced, “Mr. Allinson died abroad too far away for any of his relatives or friends to attend the funeral, it has been thought well that now, when they are convened together in his house, they may like to hear what his wishes were with regard to the disposition of his estate and the settlement of his affairs. It was fortunate that he was able to put these wishes in order before his illness had made that impossible; the document is properly signed and attested and bears every indication of cool judgment. With your permission I will now read it.”

I had never been present before at the reading of a will, and I am glad not to have had the experience since. It is too dramatic. Why more plays do not contain a will scene, I cannot understand. But the dramatic quality is not all. My objection to such a ceremony is the disappointment that one has to witness, and perhaps even more the triumph. Poor human nature’s expressions of joy on coming into a few hundred pounds can be an almost tragic spectacle.

Theodore Allinson had remembered most of his relations and all of his dependents. Such benefactions came first. “‘The remainder of the estate,’ the lawyer read on, ‘I leave in trust to my daughter Rose, to be administered as they think best by her trustees George Stratton and Julius Greville, until her twentieth birthday, when it will be hers to do as she wishes with.’”

The lawyer paused again and Mrs. Stratton indicated her approval of at any rate one of the trustees by a guarded smile.

“‘Finally,’” the lawyer went on, “‘I ask my friend and neighbour Julius Greville to become my daughter’s guardian and foster-father.’”

At these words a rustle of astonishment ran round the room, and no one could have been more astonished than myself. Mrs. Stratton did more than rustle: she bridled and shot me a furious glance. “Did you hear that, George?” she asked her husband in a loud whisper.

“If you please,” said the lawyer, and continued: “‘guardian and foster-father, reimbursing himself from her estate for every expense which that duty imposes upon him, from the present time until she shall become, on her twentieth birthday, her own mistress.’”

He paused again, and again the company sought each other’s faces. Mrs. Stratton was scarlet with indignation.

“Why, that’s thirteen years!” she exclaimed.

“But supposing that Dr. Greville, not unnaturally, is unwilling to take so great a responsibility?” Mr. Stratton asked, after a little whispered coaching from his wife.

“We are coming to that,” said the lawyer. “The will continues: ‘I ask Dr. Greville to do this great thing for me, because I have for him both affection and respect, and because such neglect towards our Rose as my own indolence and selfishness have betrayed me into has as far as lay in his power been corrected by him; also because Rose loves him and has profound confidence in him. I am conscious, however, that it is more than I have the right to ask, and if he declines, which he can do with perfect propriety and not the faintest suggestion of unfriendliness to me, I wish that Rose may become the ward of my sister Millicent Stratton, who I am sure will be delighted to have her, with the same conditions as to finance.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mrs. Stratton. “Then my brother had not entirely taken leave of his senses.”

“My dear Milly!” said her husband soothingly.

“Well, and what do you say?” Mrs. Stratton asked me eagerly. “Of course you will decline?”

“Before Dr. Greville comes to any decision,” the lawyer interposed, “there is a letter from the testator which he ought to read. It was included among the papers of the deceased, and would have been handed to Dr. Greville earlier had he not been called away.”

“But there is no need for time or consideration to be given to such a simple matter as this,” said Mrs. Stratton. “It is obvious on the face of it that a busy country doctor, living alone, can have no fitness for such a delicate task as the bringing up of a girl from seven to twenty. It’s preposterous, and any real friend of my brother would agree.”

“In any case,” said the lawyer, “I don’t think that Dr. Greville should, in fairness to himself and to every one concerned, be rushed into a decision. Here, sir, is the letter”; and he handed me an envelope, which I had the prudence to put in my pocket.

And so doing, I rose and left. It is one of the rare compensations in a general practitioner’s life that he can go when he likes and without ceremony. I don’t say that an engagement is always awaiting us; but it is our privilege first to suggest it and secondly to be exempted from cross-examination.

As soon as I was alone I read Theodore’s letter. I can give its exact words, as it is one of the very few that I have kept.

“Dear Greville,” he wrote. “I’ve been eating oysters and they’ve got me. There’s only a muddler of a doctor here and I have no hope anyway. One knows when one’s number is up. The only thing that really worries me is Rose. Be a good fellow and take charge of her and bring her up to beat the band. I can’t bear the thought of Milly getting at her and making her just like all the other women in the world. I’ve made my will, and the Consul here has witnessed it, so you will find everything in order. I wish I’d done more with my life, but I haven’t had a bad time and, after all, after a certain age one day may as well be one’s last as another. I hate not to see you again, and as for Rose. . .”

Here the letter broke off.

George Stratton and his wife were announced before I had finished dinner, and I went to them not in the best of humour. I was tired, and the day’s events had been disturbing, and I had been looking forward to a quiet dispassionate review of the whole matter. It was an evening of unusual charm too, and I am devoted to the garden in the dusk when there is only enough wind to carry the scent of flowers and not enough to disperse it. Such evenings are memorable and precious by their very infrequency and I have always grieved when one has been wasted.

Doctors, however, being more naturally, and, I suppose, even wilfully, at the mercy of other people than anyone else is, I laid aside my napkin with a sigh of surrender and once again prepared for duty.

I thought that George looked a little awkward, and I hastened to put him partly at his ease with a cigar. Mrs. George, who was clearly on the warpath, was not to be pacified so simply. Women aren’t. Even with the spread of the tobacco habit they cannot be bought, as a man and brother can, by a Corona Corona; while a whisky-and-soda is powerless, at any rate with the Milly Strattons of this earth.

She came to the point at once. “You must excuse such an informal and probably inconvenient call,” she said, “but we have to leave by an early train and I want to get everything settled. How soon will Rose be ready?”

“Ready?” I said. “For what?”

“To come to us,” she replied. “You surely don’t, on consideration, propose to fall in with my poor brother’s very curious idea of keeping his child from her own kith and kin?”

“I don’t see that I have any way out of it,” I said. “The terms of the will were that I was to be Rose’s guardian unless I had an insuperable objection; in which case she was to go to you. But although I am aware that her presence here will cause certain readjustments and that possibly the child might be happier where there were more young companions, I have no objection that for a moment could be called insuperable. Besides, your brother was a friend of mine whom I knew pretty well—possibly, through our contiguity, even better than you—and it was his wish.”

“His wish!” Mrs. Stratton echoed contemptuously. “And how capable was he, do you consider, of making a sensible wish? At any time, but particularly when he was so ill?”

“The will sounded sensible enough to me,” I said. “It has not been contested. What do you think, Stratton?”

But Stratton was not there to talk. It was the grey mare’s evening out and he was silenced almost before he had completed the preliminary stages of lip-opening.

“Even if my brother had not been at the moment so ill as to be mentally unhinged,” said Mrs. Stratton, “you must agree that the case is most peculiar. Here am I, his own sister, with children of my own more or less of Rose’s age, the properly equipped and natural person to bring up this motherless and fatherless child, and instead she is left to the tender mercies of a young man—and an unmarried man—whose only claim is that he lived next door.”

“Not his only claim,” I suggested. “It is something to have known the family for many years and to have brought the child into the world.”

“Mere accidents of adjacency and profession,” said Mrs. Stratton.

I granted that, but added that chance could rarely be separated from destiny.

Mrs. Stratton hastened to assure me that she had no patience with mystical balderdash. In any case it was absurd that a busy unmarried doctor should be selected to train an orphan—and a female orphan at that—when the orphan’s own aunt was not only ready to take over the duty but had been in the dead man’s mind. She was convinced that ninety-nine out of every hundred men in my position would have the grace—the humanity—to stand aside and give close relationship precedence. She was also convinced that no decently-honest judge, if there were such a person, would hesitate to set the will aside and give her the custody of her own flesh and blood.

I doubted if the phrase “own flesh and blood” could be applied properly to nieces.

“It’s near enough,” said Mrs. Stratton. “There’s no need to quibble about it. But to return to the question of a girl being entrusted to a young unmarried man, I consider it unsuitable in every way. It’s not nice,” she went on. “It’s not proper. It’s a kind of a scandal. The idea of a bachelor bringing up a girl!”

I pointed out that I was a little different from most men in being a doctor.

“A doctor!” she exclaimed, as though annihilating at one sniff not only every pretension I might have cherished to know anything of the healing art, but every vestige of discretion too, and all my predecessors from Galen onwards.

“At any rate,” I said mildly, “I have been practising in this neighbourhood for a good many years and I succeeded a highly-esteemed father.”

“And not without your reward,” she returned. “It was worth having one of your patients, at any rate, if you could induce him to leave you his daughter and a nice little sum to play with.”

“My dear!” said George from the sofa. “My dear!”

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Stratton. “I didn’t mean to say that. You must excuse the feelings of a sister and—and an aunt. But,” she continued, wasting no time in the nuances of regret, “at any rate you wouldn’t think of accepting this trust if you didn’t marry? You must realize that my poor brother had your marriage in mind when he made this preposterous will.”

This was a new idea to me, and it assorted ill with Allinson’s expressed views as to the matrimonial state.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“I know,” she replied.

“But,” I said, “I saw him more often and knew him more intimately in his latter days than you could have done. He gave me no hint of wishing to see me married. I could even give you a proof to the contrary, only I should not wish to run the risk of offending you.”

Mrs. Stratton intimated that she should like to hear anything that her poor brother had said.

“Very well then,” I replied. “He has often remarked what a relief it was to be able to come over to me in the evening, to a house where there were no women about to have to be polite to.”

“Disgraceful!” said Mrs. Stratton. “But his own dislike of refinement and the convenances is one thing; the bringing up of his daughter is another. I repeat that not even he would wish to leave his only child to the mercies of a bachelor. I claim to know something of his character,” she went on: “we were girl and boy together. He would have added the clause to the will if he had been more himself. I am convinced of that.”

“But he didn’t,” I pointed out. “One can take wills only as they are framed. Isn’t that so, Stratton?”

“Except in very exceptional cases, yes,” said George, with an heroic effort.

Mrs. Stratton became tearful and turned on her husband. “You never support me,” she complained. “You allow any one to override me. As if I didn’t know my own brother better than strangers could! His wish—more, his decision—would be that Dr. Greville should marry if he accepted the care of Rose. Of course you must marry,” she added, to me. “How old are you?—you look about thirty—every man of thirty should be married. There’s always something wrong with bachelors. We can’t allow—can we, George?—our niece to be brought up by a bachelor of thirty.”

“Many good men have been bachelors,” I said.

“Tell me one,” she replied, “and I shall be surprised.”

“Very well then,” I rejoined: “our Lord.”

“Don’t be blasphemous,” she said.

“I was merely being historical,” I explained meekly.

“You have no right to compare yourself with Him,” she said. “It all helps to confirm my worst fears. I didn’t intend to pass on to other matters connected with this deplorable affair; but that remark of yours has forced me to. Not only are you young and unmarried, but you treat sacred things with levity. I have not been prying, though you may think so—I should scorn the action—I have not been prying or asking questions, but I have learned that you are not a churchgoer. And not just because you’re a doctor either,” she added.

“It was not an excuse that I was about to make,” I replied. “I should not be a churchgoer whatever happened. It would involve suggestions of belief that I could not make and should not like to be dishonest about.”

“An agnostic!” she said. “How terrible! O my poor Rose!” She began to be tearful.

“There are more agnostics than you know of,” I said. “In this country, where religious questions are rarely asked and more rarely answered, no census of them could ever be taken. You probably not only know but esteem and trust scores of them.”

To this she made no verbal reply, but settled down steadily to sob.

“My dear Mrs. Stratton,” I said. “You are taking the gloomiest view without the faintest reason. You might just as well look on the case brightly.”

“Yes, yes,” said George, who had gone to his wife’s side and was stroking her with reassuring movements.

“You!” she said. “You’re always siding against me! Come away. It is no use staying here or talking any more. Such selfishness I never saw in all my life. But no good will come of it, I feel that. My poor little Rose, my poor little Rose!”

She returned to look at me with an intense yearning in her exceedingly damp features.

“I will not decide to-night,” I said.

“I shall pray that you may have the best guidance,” she assured me.

I thanked her.

“You shall know in the morning, early,” I said, “how your prayers have been answered”; and she stumbled away, blind with tears.

George followed her, pausing only for a moment to inflict upon me one of those grasps in which man assures man of understanding and allegiance, and re-states the solidarity of sex. It hurt horribly, and I nursed my hand for some moments; but it was comforting too.

It was late when I went to bed, for there was much to do and plan. I was not too happy about the future and my new responsibilities, but one thought as I turned out the gas gave me the purest joy—and that was that I was not George Stratton.

Allinson had asked a great deal. It meant a kind of bondage for thirteen years—and the years between thirty-four, my present age, and forty-seven ought to be good ones. Should a young man dedicate them to a child not his own? Ordinarily a young man would not, but my case was not quite ordinary. A doctor automatically surrenders to his profession much of his youthfulness. Some one has said that the roystering medical student must be forgiven all when it is remembered how suddenly and completely he has, on qualification, to be changed into a staid, sober and punctual servant of the public for the rest of his days—yes, and his nights. And I had always been a little old-fashioned, as we say, and the circumstance of succeeding to so big a practice so early, and being accepted favourably by so many of my father’s patients, had not impaired this characteristic. I was therefore both by nature and by profession more of a predestined guardian of another man’s child than most men even of forty-four are.

All the same, it was a tremendous responsibility, and it might result—I came back to this again and again—in a tremendous sacrifice. Because if I agreed to be Rose’s foster-father, I should have to be thorough and absolute. She might in time go to school, but while she was my child she would be mine and no one else’s. I could not share the duty of bringing her up. This means that the marriage upon which Mrs. Stratton had set her mind would not materialize. Whether or not celibacy was going to involve any kind of martyrdom for me I did not know; certainly up to the present time I had not fallen in love or felt in danger of doing so; and that is a good deal to say at thirty-four. But there were years ahead famous for their susceptibility.

And then, as to education, a girl, even when one can give her adequate attention, is a disquieting creature. One never knows of what she is thinking, as she sits there, knitting, or apparently poring over a book, or arranging flowers without a sound: more than thinking, plotting even. A boy is simpler. To begin with, he is rarely being still, and for the most part he wears his thoughts outside. As for a boy, if I had one to bring up I don’t quite know what I should teach him, except that he must not step away from fast bowling, and that it isn’t fair to get into a railway compartment where the only other passengers are a pair of lovers.

During a wakeful night my thoughts traversed the ground again and again, in unprogressive circles; but amid the dubieties that crowded on me this steady question periodically challenged me—Could you let her be brought up by that Stratton woman? Then, for the moment, I saw my course clear and shining: only however to lose it again when the gigantic difficulties of the task of education—made infinitely greater and more difficult by the fact that I was considering them in the small hours, when no man’s judgment is well-balanced—arose to darken the future.

Thus pondering and fearing, I fell asleep.

How long I should have overslept, as the result of this earlier restlessness, had not some gravel rattled on the window, I cannot say. I hastened to it and peered out. The sun was high, the scent of the garden came up warm and fresh, and just below me was Rose herself, all strange and pathetic in her stiff black clothes, lifting her transparent little face upwards and calling “Dombeen, Dombeen. Oh, I do want you so.”

How could I have disregarded such a sign? Was it not an answer to Mrs. Stratton’s prayer?

“I have decided finally to take charge of Rose, as her father wished,” I wrote to Mrs. Stratton before she left for her own home.

My first duty now was to secure Hannah Banks; because it would be necessary for Rose to have a nurse and steady companion, and I had never cared greatly for the one in Allinson’s employ.

Hannah Banks, who years before had been my own nurse, was now in retirement at Lowestoft, living with a married niece on the annuity that my father had left her; but she expressed her willingness to re-enter service, and a day or so later her motherly old face beamed once more upon me.

“To think of you,” said Hannah, “bringing up a child—and a little girl at that—without anyone to help! The idea! Of course I came. I’m not as strong as I used to be, but thank God, I’m tough.”

Rose took to her instantly, and they established themselves in a wing of the house, which, for too long much too big for me, was now becoming human again. Hannah was vigilant but not fussy: her especial qualities were a kind heart and an unsleeping thoughtfulness. She could hardly write her own name, and her reading was confined to the simplest words; but what are reading and writing compared with the conduct of life? What I wanted from Hannah was wholesome solicitude and old English simplicity; I could supply the rest myself, and later on there would be some regular lessons.

The fact that Hannah had stood in the relation of nurse also to me made her a little contemptuous of my present parental airs. You can’t bring up a boy from the cradle to boarding-school without detecting lapses from the god, and these can be remembered even when he is adult and your employer. Nor, after bringing up a boy like that, can you ever quite lose the feeling that he is still something of an infant. Since, to nice women, all men are still something of infants (and, if sensible, willing to be so), this does not ordinarily matter; but the attitude may lead to embarrassing results when one is endeavouring to cut a figure of authority, with a child of one’s own or in one’s own charge. How can a lecture on hygiene be effective when in the middle of it an officious old lady crosses the lawn with a pair of goloshes in her hands, and says: “Now, Master Julius, put these on directly. The grass is wringing wet!” For I was still Master Julius to Hannah.

There was, besides Hannah, Suzanne. It was one of my peculiarities—and how the countryside came to forgive it I never understood—to employ a French cook. I had found her on a walking tour with Theodore Allinson in Normandy in 1880; she was keeping a wayside inn near Lillebonne, and her husband having just died, and there being no children, she longed to get away to a totally new environment. She was then about thirty-two. Since she made wonderful soups out of nothing and could set a perfect omelette before you almost before the order was given, I suggested that she might like to try England and take service with me; and she jumped at the idea; and with me she remained, capable, quick and amusing.

Her French was far from the French of Paris, but she had the rapid Parisian gift of commentary, with a homely provincial sagacity added. The acquirement of English she disdained, but just as sailors go round the world on the one word “savvy,” so did she, with a similar economy, contrive to make herself understood in the house and the village. Indeed, she went farther than to refuse to acquire English, she forced French on us, so that, for example, we entirely gave up “going to bed”: we used instead to “alley coshy.”

Rose was devoted to Suzanne and she assimilated a large number of her phrases—all of which, I knew only too well, would have to be unlearned when she came under the control of a real Mademoiselle. But for the present it was more important that the child should be happy with this broad-bosomed kindly Norman, and whatever bad pronunciation she was getting was more than compensated for by the attainment of certain secrets of the cuisine. Suzanne could not read a word, but the last atom of flavour was conserved in every dish that she sent to table; and what is literature compared with cooking? One is shadow and the other is substance. She had no culture. In vain for her had her fellow Norman, Gustave Flaubert (whose statue she had no doubt seen in Rouen), toiled all his life after the elusive epithet; but her apple-jelly was more than novels and her salads were works of art. I used to look at her, serene among her pots and pans or gathering lettuces in the garden, and reflect again how little education has to do with the real progress of the world or the happiness of mankind.

Naturally enough, Hannah did not appreciate Suzanne. Like a good rural Englishwoman, she mistrusted all foreigners in general, and in the present case the feeling was aggravated by jealousy, and by pique that her own darling Rose could understand the foreigner’s gibberish where she herself could not. But the house was so managed that the two women seldom met. Hannah ate in her and Rose’s own rooms, while Suzanne rarely left the kitchen.

I have said something of Rose’s infirmary for crippled animals. With these creatures and Hannah and Suzanne and the maids and Briggs and myself, she would have had company enough; but there were others always ready to listen to her. There was, for instance, Mr. Wellicum.

In those primitive days I not only prescribed medicines but supplied them, and Mr. Wellicum was my dispenser, as he had been my father’s before me. He had seemed an old man when I was Rose’s age and ventured into his aromatic domain, and to her therefore he must have worn an air of extreme antiquity. There was this difference in his attitude to the two of us: he had disliked, or at any rate discouraged, my visits, but he rejoiced to have Rose about him. He was a short, bow-legged, grizzled man, very hairy and ursine, known to the villagers as “Crusty Bob,” and by playing tricks on him the boys increased his bearishness; but to Rose he was the mildest and most subservient slave. Others, including myself, his timid employer, were allowed in the dispensary itself only with ungracious reluctance—the lobby by the trap-door in the window being the place of the public—but Rose could do as she wished there, always on the one condition that she must not taste. He even permitted her to help in pill rolling, and not a few of the village children have been known to beg her collusion in seeing that their physic was made less nasty.

Those were the days before motor-cars—I did not see a motor-car until I was well over forty or own one until I was fifty—when a country doctor and his horse were allies and friends. I rode a little, but mostly drove, and Silver and I were on terms of the closest intimacy. She was a chestnut mare with a whitey-grey mane and tail: hence her name.

Speed, no doubt, is a great asset, especially for a busy doctor in a straggling district, but I shall always hold that we lost spiritually more than we gained materially when we substituted machinery for the horse. The horse, the school-book used to tell us, is the friend of man; and man needs friends. Petrol is his servant or his master, even his tyrant; petrol smoothes no difficulties, heals no wounds, restores no vitality, as a horse could do. On the other hand, justice compels me to admit that it has taken me to many a sick-bed at a pace that Silver would have thought unjust and have found impossible. In addition to Silver I had a bay mare named Jenny, as a second string. Both were affectionate and gentle, and Rose adored them and took astonishing and terrifying liberties with them. Some part of the ritual of grooming, in which she was proud to assist, she even carried into her own toilet. The peculiar hissing sound which ostlers make when they are curry-combing, Rose used to imitate (Hannah told me, with tears of mirth) as she brushed her hair.

That part of the ancient Persians’ simple system of education for their sons which bore upon the management of a horse (to shoot straight, manage a horse, and tell the truth, was the complete curriculum) is being missed to-day. I don’t pretend that Rose could manage one in the full sense of the word, but she had the qualities which such mastery demands—courage and confidence, mental quickness and sympathy, and a steady hand. It is not to a country’s good when the horse disappears and oil and metal take its place, for the management of a car is far less educative. To-day, roughly speaking, only farm-boys and stable-lads are being taught as the wise old Persians would wish.

Then there were the neighbours: the Rector and his family; Colonel Westerley and his wife; the old people at the post office, and the butcher and the baker, and, what is more to the point, the butcher’s and the baker’s errand boys. Rose was on the best of terms with all of these.

Some were too anxious to share in her upbringing. I exempt the butcher’s boy and the baker’s boy from this charge, and the old couple at the post office are honourably acquitted—or as honourably as persons can be who repeat telegrams to the whole village—but the Rector’s wife longed for Rose to join her two daughters in their lessons, and Mrs. Westerley was consumed by a desire to transform her into a pianist. The rectory offer I declined, but Rose sat for a while at Mrs. Westerley’s instrument, until it was decided that whatever genius she might possess lay in some other direction than music.

Mrs. Westerley, whose garden marched with mine on the other side, we could do without; but Colonel Westerley was one of Rose’s special intimates. And when I say Colonel, I mean Colonel. I mean an elderly upright man with a white moustache and courtly manners, who took the chair at meetings, and played a good game of croquet, and acted as sidesman on Sundays; the kind of army aristocrat who, by presenting the plate with a certain military éclat, made it a double privilege for the worshipper to drop in a shilling for God. I have to explain and amplify in this way because now, after the War, when I am writing, the word Colonel means nothing of the kind. Mere youths are colonels. A major called on me yesterday with a smooth-shaven white face and a baggy umbrella, to ask for my signature to some teetotal appeal. If I had trodden on his toe he would very likely have said that it was his fault. The word “Gad” has quitted the language.

Colonel Westerley had all the mildness and Christianity that, in some odd way, can seed in the composition of a certain kind of army man, to blossom forth in his retirement. One does not notice the seeding, but the flowers are very visible. He had been in India most of his life: had quelled border insurgencies and killed his country’s foes without a tremor; but now, among the croquet hoops and William Allen Richardsons, he was the soul of gentle courtesy and the Rector’s right-hand layman. The Colonel took over my “Times” at half-price at three o’clock every afternoon, and we shared a library subscription. Mrs. Westerley knitted continually for bazaars, and read aloud every evening until it was time for Patience and then bed.

Rose and the Colonel were great friends. I used to see her watching him as he pruned and grafted, and asking him searching questions as to the perils of life in India. When he corroborated her suspicions and stated that it was really true that snakes got into the bath through the hole that lets the water out, she instituted a hostility to enter that receptacle and be washed all over that was very distressing to her nurse. The Colonel’s stories of man-eating tigers had less serious results. The very good case which he made for himself as an intrepid fighting man and terror of the jungle deteriorated, however, when Rose discovered one day that he had not a single Indian coin to display to her. To see a rupee in the flesh, so to speak, had suddenly become a necessity, second only to that of beholding a real live anna, which she associated in some curious way with Hannah Banks; and the incompetent old warrior had neither. How one could leave India and not bring any such souvenirs away, Rose could not comprehend. An ivory model of the Taj Mahal, proffered in lieu of coinage, had no effect whatever, not even when fortified by the Colonel’s word-picture of the original by moonlight.

I hardly need say that many of my patients, even the serious ones, took the liveliest interest in Rose, and since nothing is so vexing to the matron and even the spinster as the spectacle of a single man bringing up a young girl, I was naturally well supplied with advice. All my patients asked about her, but as for the hypochondriacs, they made Rose a staple of conversation—conversation being their principal requirement from a doctor. Having reported on the progress of their hypothetical maladies, they got to work at once on Rose’s progress. What was she doing? What was she reading? Had I any new amusing remarks of hers to repeat?

I must not give the impression that I was wilfully taking fees from these people for nothing. They had just enough discomfort or fear of illness to warrant the request that I should add them to my visiting list, and I was never an Abernethy, to call them humbugs and refuse to waste my time under their roofs; but with less money or more to do they would have forgotten my existence. Indolence and riches, in others, are the medical profession’s best friends.

A country doctor in those days was valued for his sociability as much almost as for his skill, and there are cases when a pleasantry or two can do more good than the whole pharmacopoeia. If he can see the opportunity of being useful as a mind-doctor as well as the ordinary repairer of disordered bodies, I think that the practitioner should embrace it and take a fee for it without a blush.

My own circle of semi-friendly patients was large. There was Mrs. O’Gorman, for instance. Mrs. O’Gorman was the widow of an Irish landlord, a little lady, then between fifty and sixty, with a great gift of shrewdness and no belief in mincing her words, who was just sufficiently rheumatic to get three half-hours a week of my society, and perhaps an extra one if I chanced to be passing that way on an irregular day. She lived in luxury in a big house, with a companion called Julia, and read everything that was published both in books and periodicals; and everything that she read reminded her of something. You know the elusive Irish mind leaping from branch to branch; well, she had that, and a marvellous memory at the back of it. But whatever might be her theme, she always came back to Rose, who now and then was deposited at her house by me in the morning and picked up on my return from my rounds, replete with exotic food and burdened with gifts.

“And how’s the colleen to-day?” Mrs. O’Gorman would say, after the latest ravages wrought by uric acid on her system had been carefully described. “Damn the stuff! What’s it for, anyway? Just to keep doctors in affluence, I suppose. If the good God had asked me to help Him in making the world, which I’d take shame to put my signature to as it is, I’d have left uric acid out of it. Yes, and doctors too! Every doctor is a confession of failure on the Creator’s part.

“Have you read the article in the ‘Nineteenth Century’ on Genesis? Is it the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Julia, or the ‘Contemporary’? It doesn’t matter which, they’re both half a crown and not worth it. The man sweeps away the Garden of Eden like dust on a piano. And that reminds me, we’re going to London to hear Arpeggio. They say he’s better than Liszt, although he has short hair. But he’s a devil among the ladies, just the same.

“It’s odd, isn’t it, how these musicians—Julia, go and get the Doctor a glass of sherry and some cake—it’s odd, isn’t it, that no woman can resist them? Now, a fiddler I can understand. He stands up to it and makes those fine movements with his delicate hands; but a pianist, all bent over the box, banging away—what can they see in him?

“And tell me, what are you doing about Rose’s music? She ought to be taking lessons. A girl’s out of it if she can’t play some instrument, and it’s useful too if a dance should be improvised. Let’s see—has she good arms? If she has, she ought to play the fiddle, or the harp, only the harp’s so clumsy to take about. You want a cab every time. But it’s a lovely instrument. I heard Jenny Lind sing to a harp—the sweetest voice. There’s some fellow in the ‘Saturday Review’ this week says that Patti has never been approached: but Jenny Lind was worth a thousand of her. Patti has too much art: you notice it; Jenny Lind made you forget everything but the music. Has Rose any voice? I must get her to sing to me when you bring her over next. But you bring her so seldom.

“There’s no need to be jealous of me, you know, I’m only an old woman. But you’ll be getting jealous of all the men directly; you won’t be able to help it. Every day she’s growing up, you know, and every day some boy you’ve probably never heard of is growing up too—you don’t know where he is, and Rose doesn’t know, and he’s never heard of Rose. There he is, somewhere, in his little Eton jacket, with big ears and a snub nose as likely as not, and every minute he’s drawing nearer to Rose and she’s drawing nearer to him. And neither of them knowing a thing about it! Isn’t that terrible? Just Fate arranging everything and we all out in the cold; and no one so out in the cold as the parents and guardians!

“And what about yourself,” she went on, for she was remorseless where the relations of the sexes were concerned. “How old are you? Thirty-five, shall we say? And Rose is seven. Ah! Then when she’s twenty you’ll be forty-eight—the dangerous age! That’s the time for you to look out, Doctor. You’ll want all your strength of mind then, because we mustn’t marry our wards, you know.”

“Mrs. O’Gorman!” I protested.

“Nonsense!” she went on. “What’s the matter with facing the facts? If every one would do it this world would be a sweeter place. But why don’t you marry, anyway? What’s the matter with us? Do you hate us?”

“I’m too busy,” I said. “Life is too full.”

“Wait till you lose your pretty Rosy, and then you’ll be feeling the draught,” she retorted. “Ah, Doctor, Doctor, it’s a sad old age you’re building up for yourself; and you don’t play cards either. A sad old age!”

“Doctors shouldn’t have wives any more than actors should,” I would say. “No one should marry unless he is going to keep some kind of hours; and doctors can’t. Not at least until they’re specialists and receive patients in Harley Street from ten to one; and by that time they’re crystallized fossils. Parsons should marry—and, as a matter of fact, conspicuously do so—and stockbrokers and lawyers and country squires and most other people; but not doctors.”

“Well, it’s just as well for my rheumatism that your father had different views,” was the reply. “Not that you do me any good,” she hastened to add, “but it’s comforting to have a doctor about the place, and you’re something to talk to. You listen well.”

So she would run on.

But she did not talk like this when Rose was with her. She drew then on her memory and fancy for all that was gay and amusing; brought out old scrap-books; disinterred a musical-box from the lumber-room; and had an amazing ancient dolls’-house put into thorough repair both inside and out. Rose was happier with Mrs. O’Gorman than with anyone but, I hope, me.

I had, of course, patients in whose houses I should not care for Rose to be intimate; and it was not easy for me to repel their friendly advances. But Rose was capable, if she met them when out walking, of replying to overtures with the firmest refusals. Child as she was, she knew her own mind, and she was not old enough or weak enough to have any preoccupation with the feelings of others. It was not callousness: not at all; but it was not in her nature to adapt herself—not yet, nor would it ever be to any great extent, except for the most serious reasons. She was in a playground, and her play had so far always been with congenial spirits: why should it be otherwise? So she felt.

I had been brought up differently. I had been brought up to think of others; to spare sensibilities even to the extent of prevarication; to say “No” where I would rather have said “Yes” if I thought that “No” would be more agreeable to the other person involved: to pass the salt; to be self-denying. Rose’s father had no such attitude towards others, nor did he impose it on his daughter. He had considered the world his orange, and Rose was disposed to do the same. She had no tendency to be grasping or greedy; she had that sense of hospitality to which politeness is a corollary; while her good humour and sense of fun and laughter also made her naturally a dispenser of happiness. But nothing prevented her from telling the truth, neither fear nor favour. How I used to envy her this!

Every teacher must learn something from the taught, I suppose, though it be only an idea of his own ignorance. And I found myself learning from Rose all the time. Her simplicities rebuked my complexities; her innocence disturbed my sophistication. But most I learned from her not only the importance of truth-telling in the social system, but the superior excellence of it in the difficult scheme of civilized life. By always telling the truth one saves oneself from a multitude of fatiguing cares. I don’t say that Rose knew this, even subconsciously; she told the truth because it was in her nature. But it might also have been her privilege. Of all people, a pretty woman has least reason to put herself to the trouble of inventions; because she would always be forgiven.

It was of course too late for me to become truthful spontaneously, as Rose could be; but under her influence, child as she was and fully grown man (if any man is ever fully grown) as I was, I learned to think twice and be truthful on the second thought. I learned, too, through her unconscious tuition, that other people’s feelings are rarely as delicate as we fancy them, and often never worth serious consideration; at any rate, that the health of one’s own soul is more important than the comfort of anyone else.

I speak of myself as a teacher, but I had dispensed no formal instruction. Whatever Rose got from me was in the ordinary course of conversation, at breakfast and in the garden and at odd times, and perhaps particularly at night, when she had gone to bed and I sat with her for half an hour and, according to Hannah, excited her little brain. I am sure that I have advised thousands of parents not to overdo the good-night gossip; but doctors rarely practise what they preach.

I used to read to her too; and if she had not wanted the same stories so often we might have consumed hundreds of books together. Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River” (does anyone read that now?) was one of her favourites, and I could not substitute a word in it without being detected. That legend is, of course, a lesson too.

All that I had to offer was a gradus to life. The real instructors would come later, with their geography and history and mathematics and languages and so forth. The most that I hoped for was that, indirectly, the effect of my general attitude to things might be that Rose some day would be able to avoid a few pitfalls. To get positive qualities into another is more difficult than to implant a certain caution. “Oh, you men are all alike!” I felt that if I could make it impossible for Rose ever to say that, I should have done something far better than to fill her mind with facts and figures.

Among all the trivialities of our life together in those early days it is difficult to make a selection of saliences. Rose was not a remarkable child in any way, except perhaps in the lack of special qualities. She was quiet and self-contained and, I used to think, very sensible: perhaps her general good sense was her strongest point. She was not a universal sympathizer, but where her affections were set she was very tenacious in her kindnesses and even tendernesses. I remember an incident which illustrates this characteristic.

We had at that time a dog named Rex, a Clumber spaniel, which all too seldom I took out shooting. He was called mine, but in reality was Rose’s, fixing himself to her like a shadow, and being miserable when she was out and he had not been allowed to go too.

Well, one evening at the time when Rose took out his great dish of broken victuals, Rex was nowhere to be found. He had never strayed before, and we had no cheering theory to propound to the child to account for his conduct. Other theories we kept to ourselves, such as the possibility of a thief having enticed Rex away, or that he had followed a hare into preserved ground and had got into a trap, or even had been shot. A new keeper on one of the neighbouring estates had been heard to vow extermination to any dog that he caught trespassing.

No one allowed Rose to hear conjectures of this kind, but we all rather obviously shared her anxiety, and she was able to see through our forced airs of assurance.

The hours went on, and still no Rex. Rose’s bed-time came and was long passed, but she would not consent to leave the hall door. There she stood, now and then calling, with the dish of food beside her.

Hannah was furious, but to no purpose. Dogs to her were just dogs—four-footed creatures, useful to bark at night and protect the house, but given to importing mud into houses and not blameless as to the encouragement of fleas. Many a conflict have we had, she and I, over Rex’s charter to roam where he would, upstairs or down. On this occasion we came to a wider cleavage than ever, for Hannah (and, from her point of view, very rightly) wished Rose to go to bed, whereas I, although conscious that as a habit such vigils would be very bad for her, was inclined to accede to her tearful wishes and allow her on this occasion to wait up. Such evidences of solicitude for her dog were very gratifying.

“I can’t go to bed, Dombeen, until I know,” she said, and she had my sympathy.

“You shall stay up,” I assured her, “till—till—”

“Till he comes back?” she supplied eagerly.

“No, I couldn’t promise that,” I said. “You see, he may have been found wandering by some one who has tied him up till the morning and will then bring him home. And you couldn’t wait up till then, could you?”

“Yes I could,” said Rose.

“Well even if you could, I couldn’t let you,” I said. “But you shall stay up till—till midnight, say. Till the clock strikes twelve.”

“Oh no, later than that,” said Rose. “Mayn’t I wait till three?”

We compromised upon half-past one, and Hannah’s opinion of me sank still lower.

“Calls himself a doctor!” I fancy I heard her muttering.

Meanwhile, in his devotion, old Wellicum was scouring the neighbourhood in one direction, and Briggs in another, and the stable-boy in a third.

They straggled back at about midnight, and at half-past one I moved the closure and we all went to bed, fearing the worst.

It was just three when I was awakened by a furious knocking at the door and a joyous voice crying, “Dombeen, Dombeen, he’s come back!”

And so he had, the rascal, after what we discovered later to have been simply a distant amatory expedition.

Rose, it seems, although she had consented to go to bed, had got up again and had been sitting by the window until she had seen love’s pilgrim creep in.

Downstairs we went, in our dressing-gowns, and fed him and petted him as though he were a hero instead of a mere voluptuary. What kind of a welcome Rex had expected, and what he thought of the surprising turn that things had taken and our manifestations of delight, I can only guess, but being a Clumber he probably laughed long when at last he regained his kennel.

It was when Rose was ten or eleven that the Hall, the big house of the place, with a park around it, was bought by Sir Edmund Fergusson, and local society was enriched by the addition of his family, which consisted of Lady Fergusson and their only child, Ronald, or Ronnie, who was about Rose’s own age.

The Fergussons naturally became my patients. Sir Edmund’s trouble was gout, which, like most gouty people, he did nothing consistently to check. Sporadically he was careful in his diet, but then would arrive a temptation that he could not resist. A large part of all doctors’ lives is taken up in scolding gouty patients for their imprudences and patching them up into a condition to commit more.

Ronnie Fergusson had a tutor at that time, and Rose a governess; and neither instructor was inclined to extend the working hours unreasonably. During the playing hours the two children were much together. They had a crow’s nest in one of the Fergussons’ trees, and an empty furnace-pit under a disused greenhouse of mine served them as a robbers’ cave.

Ronnie’s parents having married late, he was more like their grandson than son, and therefore a little lonely, and Rose’s companionship was exactly what his nature needed.

Until Rose was thirteen I knew nothing but serenity in my foster-fatherhood. But then she gave me a shock. It turned out to be a false alarm in that it set up no precedent, but for a while I was nervous.

I had decided to send her to school. Were my own pleasure the only consideration I should have kept her at home, but a girl ought to be among others, to learn give-and-take, adjustment, and so forth. Thirteen was late, of course, but she was not quite like other girls—an only child is always a little different—and the lateness did not matter.

In practical matters she already knew more than any of her teachers could tell her. She knew a good deal about medicine and the care of invalids, derived principally from Hannah, but a little from me; she had presided at the tea-table for years and prepared the infusion like a Chinese philosopher; she could make an omelette. She had a considerable store of Norman patois. She had countless books, many of them far beyond her years. It would probably have been better if she continued to remain at home; but she was too normal to be denied ordinary procedure, or I was too normal to have the courage to deny it her.

After many fruitless inquiries and inconvenient visits, I had allowed Mrs. Stratton to find Rose a school. It was at Brighton, where more young people seem to be taught than, judging by the passivity of the fishermen on the railings, fish are drawn from the sea; and I was assured that there was no more admirable establishment, and that Miss Saltoun was the last word in sympathetic and cultured head-mistress-ship. I went to see her and was more or less satisfied. Not wholly; but having had no experience as a selector of educationalists, I let it go, especially as I was more than pleased with the material conditions of the building—light, air, and so forth.

Rose and I had a silent breakfast on the fatal day. She had been looking forward to it with mixed feelings, sometimes glad to be joining such a company of girls after so much isolation, sometimes forlorn indeed at the thought of leaving her home. On the last evening she had broken down completely; but in the morning she wore an expression of grim resolution, which I admired too much to run the risk of dissolving it by talking about any unsafe subject; and no subject seeming to be safe, I said nothing.

Her farewell to the household was tearful; but she pulled herself together to part bravely from me, and then she and Hannah drove off. It was a double breaking up of tradition; for Hannah, after taking her to Paddington and putting her into the hands of Mrs. Stratton, who would convoy her to Victoria, where there were reserved compartments for the school, was to go on to her home at Lowestoft, alas! for ever. She had been growing more infirm and could no longer manage the stairs, and when Rose came back for the holidays there was to be a new maid for her, instead of our old friend. It was part of the new programme that Rose was to be generally more self-reliant.

More self-reliant!

It was on a Tuesday that Rose departed. Just as I was finishing my soup on the following Thursday evening, who should walk in but Rose and fling herself on her knees beside me and shake with sobs?

There she knelt, with my hand on her head trying to allay the storm, for minutes.

“O Dombeen!” she managed at last to say. “I couldn’t stay there. It’s—it’s—horrid. You wouldn’t like me to stay there. Really you wouldn’t.”

The fact that I didn’t ask her to explain, that I took it for granted that she was right, will indicate at once the kind of fatalist that I was, and our sub-conscious terms of understanding.

Rose was tired out—too tired to eat—and I am afraid that in the absence of Hannah, whose loss was a terrible disappointment—for although Rose had known of it she had not fully realized it—she cried herself to sleep.

I don’t pretend to have had much of a night’s rest myself, for such a false start as this was no part of the educational programme. Theodore’s phrase “bring her up to beat the band”—rang in my ears.

Was this beating the band? On the face of it, no. We must not run away. And yet (I argued) to run away often implies more character than to endure, and surely that was Rose’s case. She was not a coward, she was not self-indulgent; that I knew. Nor did she imagine things. Child as she was, I trusted her judgment and accepted the position. The school was horrid, and she couldn’t stay there; that was enough. I knew her sufficiently well to be sure that she would have put up with it if she had believed that any good could result; but she knew the reverse and she had acted accordingly. She had walked out of the house, found her way to the station, and the pocket-money I had given her and her own resourcefulness had done the rest.

The next morning I had a very pale and demure companion at breakfast. She also had evidently been thinking, and had seen that thus to take the law into her own hands was a proceeding of considerable magnitude—such magnitude that she looked dwarfed under it. But although subdued and pianissimo, there was no sign of weakness on her features. It may have been a gigantic effort of independence, but she did not regret it.

I had sent to Brighton a reassuring telegram (crossing one from Osborne House) on the previous evening, and on the arrival of a second telegram from Miss Saltoun saying that she was on her way to see me, I dispatched Rose to Mrs. O’Gorman’s for the day, with an explanatory note.

Not long afterwards a very indignant Miss Saltoun arrived for an interview. Her idea no doubt was to take Rose back with her; but I had no intention of permitting that. I did not even let them meet, to Miss Saltoun’s intense surprise. Should she be still alive, I doubt if her eyebrows have yet resumed their normal level, to such an altitude did she lift them when I announced my decision.

“But it is fatal to let a child behave like this,” she said. “It is the end of all discipline. What would come to the world if no one were punished?”

I said that Rose would not lack punishment. Her shame in not being able to remain at Brighton was punishment. She was not proud of herself at all, I said, even though she couldn’t do anything else but run away.

“But suppose every child ran away!” said Miss Saltoun. “What would the world come to!”

“It would probably be very good for the world,” I said. “Because only children with character have the pluck to take such a step.”

“No one has ever run away from Osborne House before,” said Miss Saltoun.

“And probably no one ever will again,” I said.

“It will be very damaging to me,” she protested, “if it gets to be known, as of course it must do. Of what did Rose complain?”

I said that I hadn’t asked her.

“Not asked her!” Miss Saltoun exclaimed. And I could see her swiftly putting two and two together and realizing that it was my deplorable indulgence that was at the back of everything.

“No,” I said. “She merely said that she could not stay and had therefore come home.”

“And you allow that? Condone that? It’s too amazing! Is every caprice of a child like this to satisfy you?”

“I don’t think she is capricious,” I said. “I agree with you that the occurrence is unfortunate. I wish it had never been. I wish Rose had not gone to school at all, anywhere. But I would much rather—even at the risk of being unfair to you—that she were not interrogated.”

Miss Saltoun kept her temper under fair control, but she could not help indicating that she was glad that all her pupils had not such impossible parents or foster-parents, and that on the whole she was of the opinion that she was well out of it.

Nor did I feel particularly pleased with the position I had been forced to take up. It was not too civil, and I doubt if it was just to the schoolmistress. But Rose was my first consideration, and I knew with crystal clearness that no possible good to either could come out of a cross-examination of her by Miss Saltoun. Miss Saltoun would have been hostile and suspicious, utterly incapable of understanding the child’s fundamental honesty and courage, nor would she have had any belief that a child’s antipathies, a child’s dislike of Dr. Fell, need not be less sincere or important than an adult’s. To her, children were immature beings to be taught deportment and the length of rivers; to me, Rose was an individual, separate and complete, with private sensitivenesses and loyalties that must not be harmed.

Miss Saltoun caught her train, and I drove over to Mrs. O’Gorman to fetch Rose back. I had sent her there for the day, to be out of the way and also to be in the company of the most sensible woman I knew.

I found them turning over old volumes of “Punch,” and having sent Rose off to help Julia in some capacity or other, Mrs. O’Gorman turned to me with a smile on her mischievous old face.

“This is a pretty kettle of fish,” I remarked.

“You ought to be proud of yourself,” she said.

“Why?”

“To have brought her up so well. I don’t mean what you’ve taught her, but to have left so much resolution in her. Most people knock it out.”

“More chance than design,” I said.

“Anyway, she’s got it,” said Mrs. O’Gorman, “and if she always obeys impulse and cuts her losses so promptly she won’t go far wrong. Her heart’s true.”

“Meanwhile?” I asked.

“Meanwhile,” she said, “she wants to go to school. When I say ‘wants’ I mean something very different; I mean she’s willing to go to school and she knows she ought to go to school. She doesn’t think, and she won’t admit (you see I’ve been testing her) she did wrong to run away from this one—and I agree with her—but she knows that if she stayed at home now it would be a victory wrongly won. And she doesn’t want to do anything unfair, bless her! although, of course, she’ll have to before she’s through. The world will see to that!”

“What school?” I asked.

“Well, that’s your affair,” said Mrs. O’Gorman, “but, this time, for the love of God find it yourself. How you came to let that Stratton woman pick out the other for you I shall never understand. And you more or less a sensible fellow too! But there, we’ve all got our blind spots. Even I can’t bring myself to change my medical adviser.”

At her next school Rose was happy and did well.

While she was away, I gave more time to an old toy of mine—the microscope—and was gradually, I doubt not, becoming a fossil. I was beginning also to supplement the collection of prints which my father had left, and buying experience rather dearly. Between the holidays these were my indoor hobbies, while there was always the garden for such daylight hours as my patients left me. Now and then I dined out, at the Hall or the Rectory or with Mrs. O’Gorman; and so the time wore on. To be creatures of habit seems to be our destiny, and if we are to escape we must continually fight. Personally, I did not fight. I was counting on Rose to be my deliverer when, at the end of her last school term, she returned to galvanize her old foster-father and keep him gay once more.

Every time Rose came home, three times a year, I saw a change in her, but it was not until the winter holidays when she was nearly sixteen that I suddenly realized that she had grown into a beautiful creature, capable of setting men’s hearts beating, and of disturbing lives and affecting destinies. Not, of course, that one has to be beautiful to affect destiny: we can all do that, and all are doing it continually. But pretty women appear to be busier than other persons, even if they are not.

There had been a week of clear skies and pure sunshine, and an east wind blowing with sufficient nippiness to keep the ice hard. Rose had been skating every day with various neighbours, and she and two or three young fellows were now walking up the drive jangling their skates and laughing. Her high gaiters made her look unusually tall, and she came along with her easy long stride like a conqueror, her face glowing under the frost and her eyes alight with merriment. She wore a fur cap and a fur jacket with a high collar, and you know what furs can do for even a plain woman. Rose’s vivid animation was almost fire; but what struck me most was a new confidence, unconscious but visible, and the deference and competitive eagerness which were expressed in her companions. When I had seen her last, at lunch, she had been a girl; now, only three hours later, she was an influence.

I don’t suggest that from that moment her life was more mature; I don’t think that with any steadiness it was; but the dominant woman had flashed out for a moment, and I never forgot the apparition.

In those days, although Rose had several boy satellites, who seemed to me, with not too numerous opportunities of observing them closely, to be on terms of a very simple natural intimacy with her, chief of them was still Ronnie Fergusson. He was her most constant companion, dropping in oftener than the others, and taking her on longer expeditions or more frequently joining in our games at home, whether indoors or out. Although I was in the forties I was active on the tennis lawn, and at billiards I could beat anyone in the neighbourhood. I had been coaching Rose and finding her a much better pupil than I ever expected: perhaps the vanity in her stimulated her to try the harder, for there were mirrors at each end of the room in which she could see herself, and there is hardly a stroke in the game which does not emphasize the beauty of arms and hands. Ronnie was a billiard enthusiast too, but I kept Rose ahead of him, and they became very keen combatants. He was at my house after dinner on most evenings during the holidays.

Ronnie’s parents we did not much care for. Sir Edmund Fergusson, who was now retired, had been a northern manufacturer and mayor: a roughish nouveau-riche, with a great desire to assimilate county manners and play as naturally as possible his new role of squire. Lady Fergusson was an ordinary motherly woman, with a good deal of pride in her husband and a touch of the snob. Both adored their son, but whereas Lady Fergusson showed her feelings, Sir Edmund disguised his.

Ronnie, although not to that status born, had become a typical English public-school boy with an easy manner, a delight in fun and a merry hair-trigger laugh. Good to look at too, with his fair hair and lightly-tanned skin and very white teeth. He did not suggest any great force of character: his blunt little nose was against that; but he seemed to be an epitome of affection and good humour, and was likely to succeed in the world by reason of an inherent popularity. The kind of boy and man that others who might reasonably be envious would go out of their way to serve, just to have a smile of gratitude and to enjoy the sensation of having benefited a persuasive creature. However rich Ronnie might become he would receive more; because of those who have, and to whom therefore is given, he was among the most attractive.

The world is a strange place; and why some of us are born so that we may not look over a hedge, while others may steal a whole remount camp and escape censure, no one will ever understand. But Ronnie was high among the immune horse-thieves.

He did things well, too. He played games well and looked his best in flannels. Our village cricket team, which languished through the early weeks of the season and was too often beaten, rallied when Ronnie came home for the holidays and had its sweet revenge in the return matches. If Rose was still defeating him at billiards it was because her tactics were better. She had more strategy.

The Ronnies of the world usually marry young and go fairly happily through their wedded life. This perhaps is because their attraction is neither for very clever women nor for decadents, but for the jolly. The sporting, adventurous—I might almost say picnic—element in young people’s marriages lasts with these longer than with more serious or more brilliant or more passionate couples.

There was, however, no outward sign of anything deeper than the best good-fellowship between Ronnie and Rose. They liked and laughed, and handed each other the half-butt, and there it remained.

But a year later there were developments.

England is no country for the skating enthusiast, and Rose continually mentioned her desire to spend the following Christmas holidays—her last—at one of the winter-sport centres in Switzerland. To be away at that time of year, when maladies are most flourishing, was no easy or prudent course for me; but Rose was set upon it, and one can always get a locum tenens if one really wants to, and I had not played truant for a long while, and might be all the better for it after; and so I agreed.

The next thing was—Ronnie must come too. Ronnie, who was now at Sandhurst, was far more eager to spend his holidays with us than at the Hall; and the dream of his life was to be in some place where you could count on the frost lasting till to-morrow. It is always a mystery to me how in our island, with the Gulf Stream persistently paying attentions to it, anyone learns to skate at all. Ronnie, however, had had the chance to become a good skater, and he longed to be better and to do some skiing and bob-sleighing too. Rose shared his enthusiasm.

I must admit to feeling doubtful as to whether it was the wisest thing to take a boy of eighteen and a girl of seventeen to Switzerland in this way; but the fact that their minds were so exclusively set on open-air activities reassured me. And the Fergussons made no objections, beyond expressing the regret that their only son should wish to be away for Christmas.

None the less I carried the matter to Mrs. O’Gorman’s tribunal; for when in doubt I invariably adopted that procedure.

“Take them? Of course you’ll take them,” she said. “Or rather, they’ll take you. And it’s high time you got away from this mouldy corner and allowed some mountain air to get into your fusty old brain!”

“Is it so fusty?” I asked.

“Of course it is. How can it be anything else, considering the life you lead? Sitting by the bedsides of bores; prescribing physic; talking weather; pottering about within a radius of five miles when there’s the whole big world waiting for you. I’ve no great opinion of you, as you know, but you’ve got the best brains in the place—London brains, in short—and you do nothing with them. Perhaps when you see Mont Blanc you’ll get a little ambition. I don’t want you to leave us, but I want you to do something besides patching up our twopenny-halfpenny bodies. Write a book.”

I laughed aloud at this. How little did I foresee!

“Very well, then; make some scientific investigations; anything to justify your gifts.”

“The point is,” I said, “is it wise for Rose and Ronnie to be thrown together as they will be on this trip?”

“Wise?”

“Yes, is it wise?”

“I don’t know what you mean by wise. Do you mean, will it increase their inclination to fall in love?”

“Well—yes, I suppose I do.”

“Would that be so unwise?” she asked.

“I don’t know that it would,” I said. “But I’d rather it didn’t happen yet.”

“Well,” she said. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, no matter what you do. And if it isn’t, your taking them to Switzerland won’t make any difference. Both of them are rapidly reaching an age when no one can protect them. Nature will be in charge; not parents or Dr. Grevilles. Switzerland, wherever you go, will be full of young people, and they’ll both make friends, and very likely they’ll lose their hearts too. It’s out of your hands. Supposing you don’t go, it will be just the same.”

I acquiesced.

All went well for a few days. And then Ronnie, against my counsel, and also against Rose’s, which usually prevailed, joined a party on a bobsleigh, and was carried into the hotel, an hour later, with a fractured leg and a vast variety of bruises. I let the Fergussons know, assuring them that there was no danger, and together Rose and I, with the assistance of a nurse, got him through. He was fairly patient, but his disappointment was acute, and now and then under his weakness he broke down. More than once I went into the room to find Rose soothing him as though he were a baby. All his dependence came out, to be met by all her tenderness. I had not thought she possessed such hidden stores of it.

I must confess to feeling miserably out in the cold most of the time, for Ronnie, though he was as gay as possible with me, and brave enough under the pain that his dressings inflicted, was happy only with Rose, and I could not fail to see it. And he exacted far too much attention from her. I hardly had any of her company. She could not do this or that because Ronnie might want her; Ronnie would be lonely; she had promised Ronnie to read to him; she had sworn that when he woke up, no matter at what time, he should find her beside him. I admired her sense of duty—and resented it too!

After a fortnight the Fergussons joined us, to supervise their son’s recovery, and Rose and I went home, for she had her school and I my practice; but I was conscious that not all of her was with me in the train; and Ronnie’s parting from her, I realised, had been too emotional. Suddenly he had kissed her as though his heart was breaking, and she had almost to be torn away.

I have seen so many sick men under the influence of gratitude to their nurses that I did not lay very much stress on this incident; but I could not forget it. I wished, however, that Rose should, and during the journey back I did all that I could to distract her. She was very quiet at first, but gradually became more like herself, and by the time we reached home and she began to prepare for school she seemed usually, at any rate when with me, natural again and free from care. But away from me? And when she was day-dreaming? It was at these times that I realized again and bitterly how finite is our understanding of each other. We live alone! I would have given anything to be able to penetrate her thoughts, and help. But I could not.

Was she in love or merely reflective? Was she looking back or forward? I longed to know, but could not ask.

Mrs. O’Gorman cheered me up. “It’s likely it’s nothing at all,” she said. “Just a passing storm, even if that. Very few of the romances of seventeen persist. I was like that myself: my heart was broken a dozen times before I was Rose’s age, and at eighteen I seriously meditated suicide because my violin teacher was married. It was in Dublin. I remember to this hour the smell of the Liffey that came up to me as I leaned over Carlisle Bridge one evening coming back from a lesson, and pretended I wanted to drown myself and all my grief. No one could have entered such water as that! And ten days later I had forgotten all about the fiddler, and was inventing a novel with me the heroine and the hero an actor at the theatre that week, who didn’t even know of my existence. Maybe Rose will be like that. Don’t worry.”

Rose had only two more terms, and as she spent most of the Easter holidays with a school-fellow, she did not meet Ronnie. During the few days she was with me she seemed to be heart-whole; certainly there was no suggestion of blighted affection, for her spirits were of the highest. So Mrs. O’Gorman, I assumed, was right again.

It was just before Rose’s return from school for ever, in the summer, that I had an unexpected visit from Mrs. Stratton, in the character of the solicitous aunt. She arrived in the forenoon, and while doing justice to lunch unfolded her purpose. Briefly it was to renew the attack begun eleven years earlier, only now with perhaps more reasonableness.

My unpardonable offence was still the same—celibacy, but it had assumed an increased gravity. To be a bachelor of thirty-four in charge of a child of seven was deplorable enough; but to be a bachelor of forty-five in charge of a girl of eighteen was heinous. It was thus that her nasty mind worked. And not only hers but, she assured me, countless other persons’. In fact, I gathered from her remarks that the unsuitability of my household was the only theme with which, in a few days’ time, the world would be occupied.

“This morbid interest in my affairs is very disgusting,” I said.

Mrs. Stratton admitted it; but how could I deny that some handle was being given? “You two alone here.”

“Well, I do deny it, absolutely,” I said. “Don’t you all know the conditions of the will? Don’t you know that Rose is in my care until she is twenty—that is to say, for two more years—entrusted to me by her father, to act as a father in his place? It is monstrous to suggest that I am not worthy of that confidence.”

“But I am not suggesting that,” Mrs. Stratton replied indignantly.

“Of course you are,” I said. “The mere fact that you come here and put these ideas into my head is tantamount to a charge, an indictment.”

“I don’t mean that,” she protested.

“It doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not: the effect is the same. By bringing your indecent suspicions here you are hoping to make it impossible for me any more to be natural with this girl.”

“No, no!”

“Yes, yes,” I replied. “Excuse me if I speak with plainness, but I feel strongly about it. It is abominable. Don’t you believe that decent living and pure affection are possible in this world?”

“I am sure they are, but I am troubled about my niece’s—my brother’s only child’s—good name.”

I thanked her sarcastically for the compliment. I was conscious that I was being rude, but I could not control myself. There are some persons who always draw out our inferior qualities, just as the companionship of others can increase the value of our character by fifty per cent. Mrs. Stratton invariably evoked my worst side. Any fine edge that I possessed was blunted when we were together.

“It is what people may think and say that is so disturbing to me,” she explained. “You know how they talk.”

“I am learning,” I said. “But anyone over thirty-five should have acquired an indifference to public opinion.”

“That is a counsel of perfection,” she replied. “In ordinary life we are all governed by it, or at any rate we are largely influenced. It would be heart-breaking to me if I thought that people were saying horrid things about Rose and you. Mind, I don’t say that they are talking already,” she conceded. “But they’ll begin very soon.”

“How soon?” I asked.

“I can’t say with any definiteness. How could I?”

“Well,” I said, “I want to know. It is your business to tell me. Rose comes back on Wednesday. Will they begin on Thursday?”